Classical philosophy and Darwinian biology are far more compatible than is usually assumed. In fact, looking at either from the standpoint of the other can enrich and deepen our appreciation of both. From a Darwinian point of view, the theories of Plato and Aristotle deserve to be taken very seriously. From the classical point of view, Darwinian biology is much less reductionist than its enemies suppose.

Asma pushes a number of
provocative ideas that seem very plausible to me.One goes like this:

It might seem self-evident to the sentimental pet owner that
our fellow creatures have emotions, but science has long been loath to admit
it. Yet Jaak Panksepp, professor of veterinary anatomy at Washington State
University College, says this is one area where our anthropomorphic tendencies
are probably in the right: animals do have complex emotional lives.

This involves the familiar
problem of anthropomorphizing animals.Just because a snarling dog looks angry to me doesn’t tell me whether he
experiences anger in anything like the way I do.On the other hand, assuming that animals are
not capable of emotional states seems to me to reek of dualism; that is, it
supposes that human beings possess a soul that is so unique as to remove us
from the category of animals.I suggest
that the latter leads us further astray than anthropomorphizing animals ever
did.

Ethologists who study animal behaviour increasingly accept
the idea that fear keeps animals away
from predators, lust draws them
toward each other, panic motivates
their social solidarity and care
glues their parent-offspring bonds. Just like us, they have an inner life
because it helps them navigate their outer life.

That is the most parsimonious
interpretation of the phenomena.A
second idea is that human minds emerge from a series of “brains” arranged one
atop the other.

Neuroscience has begun to correct the computational model by
showing how our rational, linguistic mind depends on the ancient limbic brain,
where emotions hold sway and social skills dominate. In fact, the cognitive
mind works only when emotions preferentially tilt our deliberations…Our
rational mind is truly embodied, and without this emotional embodiment we
have no preferences. In order for our minds to go beyond syntax to semantics,
we need feelings. And our ancestral minds were rich in feelings before they
were adept in computations [my italics].

Our neo-cortex mushroomed to its current size less than one
million years ago. That’s a very recent development when we remember that the
human clade or group broke off from the great apes in Africa 7 million years
ago. That future-looking, tool-wielding, symbol-juggling cortex grew on top of
the limbic system. Older still is the reptile brain — the storehouse of innate
motivational instincts such as pain-avoidance, exploration, hunger, lust,
aggression and so on. Walking around (very carefully) on the Serengeti is like
visiting the nursery of our own mind.

I
have pointed out here that this hierarchically layered model of the mind
was explicitly advanced by Aristotle in his masterful On the Soul.I suggest that
Aristotle’s view corrects for both dualism and anthropomorphizing.It presents an embodied mind that allows the
human being full ontological status without divorcing it from its animal
origins.

Asma has some criticisms of
evolutionary psychology.

Evolutionary psychologists have tried to apply Chomsky’s
module idea to almost every other mental activity. What kind of food we like,
what kind of spouse we’re looking for, our phobias of snakes and spiders, our
preference for certain kinds of stories, even our ability to detect cheaters in
a group: all have been attributed to specialised programs in the brain. This
neat, formulaic explanation of human psychology plays well in the popular
press, but it seems less convincing as we learn more about brain development
and early human ecology.

Its chief rival is the school of ‘general intelligence’.
According to this view, the neocortex is a highly flexible, general problem
solver. Our environment selected for a mind with reliable pattern recognition
and prediction powers, but it didn’t give us specific modules for thought
contents or behaviors. As affective neuroscience advances, this scenario comes
to look more credible, albeit with a surprising twist. It seems that even the
emotional springs of the limbic system — our fear, care, rage and so forth —
are more pliable and open-ended than we previously thought…

This criticism seems to be
confused.Evolutionary psychology does seek
to identify evolved psychological mechanisms, but it hardly insists that these
mechanisms are inflexible.Mental schema
for distinguishing kin from non-kin, allies from enemies, have to be flexible
and responsive to context.Moreover,
flexibility seems to come chiefly from having a considerable number of distinct
mechanisms that may be drawn upon in a pinch, each one of which enables novel
responses in novel contexts.The whole
point of the layered theory of mind advocated by Asma is that human
intelligence depends on a lot of prepackaged software, something that is very
different from any notion of “general intelligence.”

Another death-knell for old-school evolutionary psych might
be sounding from the field of hominin-era climate studies. A vital premise for
the modular theory is that our minds evolved in an extremely stable, unchanging
environment. If our current minds are a mishmash of Pleistocene adaptations,
then the conditions that shaped our brains must have been very consistent, or
else natural selection couldn’t sculpt each module to fit our perennial
environmental challenges. But it now appears (thanks to the work of
paleoanthropologists such as Rick Potts) that the environment was anything but
stable during the brain boom. In fact, it was precisely the climate chaos of
this era that created our multipurpose, problem-solving minds.

Again, there seems to be some confusion.Human beings share some of our genetic heritage
with all other animals.Tool box genes
are one example.The layered theory of
mind that Asma advocates tells us that we share significant parts of our brain’s
architecture with other animals, including reptiles.That means that some parts of our environment
have not changed significantly over the course of evolutionary history.Just as the astonishing stability of ants
over millions of years points to an environmental niche that was very stable,
so the presence of reptilian architecture in the human brain suggests that some
environmental challenges have been persistent for very long periods of
time.

No doubt the environment of
evolutionary adaptation was subject to a lot of changes, due to climate and
other factors.Regardless of those
changes, our ancestors still had to find mates and allies.Females had to make sure their investments
were as secure as possible and males still had to make sure they were investing
in the right offspring.If evolutionary
explanations are worth anything, it is because some things change while others
do not.

I look forward to more from
affective neuroscience.It certainly
looks like the right idea.